The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, originally published in 1893, by Arthur Conan Doyle.Doyle had decided that these would be the last collection of Holmes&#39;s stories, and intended to kill him off in &quot;The Final Problem&quot;. Reader demand stimulated him to write another Holmes adventure&mdash;The Hound of the Baskervilles. In &quot;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&quot;, Holmes relates the aftermath of &quot;The Final Problem&quot;, and how he survived.

&quot;Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street&quot; is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam&#39;s Magazine, and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copy or do any other task required of him, with the words &quot;I would prefer not to&quot;. The lawyer cannot bring himself to remove Bartleby from his premises, and decides instead to move his office, but the new proprietor removes Bartleby to prison, where he perishes.

Life in the Iron Mills is a short story written by Rebecca Harding Davis in 1861, set in the factory world of the nineteenth century. It is one of the earliest American realist works, and is an important text for those who study labor and women&#39;s issues. It was immediately recognized as an innovative work, and introduced American readers to &quot;the bleak lives of industrial workers in the mills and factories of the nation.&quot;

The Decameron (Italian title: &quot;Decameron&quot; [deˈkaːmeron; dekameˈrɔn; dekameˈron] or &quot;Decamerone&quot; [dekameˈroːne]), subtitled &quot;Prince Galehaut&quot; (Old Italian: Prencipe Galeotto [ˈprentʃipe ɡaleˈɔtto; ˈprɛntʃipe] and sometimes nicknamed &quot;Umana commedia&quot;, &quot;Human comedy&quot;), is a collection of novellas by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313&ndash;1375). The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio probably conceived of The Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence (for example on Chaucer&#39;s The Canterbury Tales), it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of classical early Italian prose.

&quot;The Monkey&#39;s Paw&quot; is a supernatural short story by author W. W. Jacobs first published in England in the collection The Lady of the Barge in 1902.In the story, three wishes are granted to the owner of the monkey&#39;s paw, but the wishes come with an enormous price for interfering with fate.It has been adapted scores of times in other media, including plays, movies, TV shows, operas, stories and comics, as early as 1903 and as recently as 2017.

&quot;The Fall of the House of Usher&quot; is a narrative short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton&#39;s Gentleman&#39;s Magazine before being included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story is a work of detective fiction and includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.